Strata

by Terry Pratchett

  He drove with three arms draped nonchalantly over the seat.

  Four arms. Four-arms were rare. In the bad old days before the Revolution, high-caste kung had used mitogenetic techniques to influence the growing embryo. Four-arms meant warrior caste. Kin decided to try tact.

  ‘How come,’ she asked, ‘how come you have to have shirts specially made?’

  He didn’t look round. ‘Family tradition,’ he said. ‘My family always sent one male into the warriors, and they operated on my mother, but – you remember the Line Break of ’58?’

  ‘Sure. Earth was cut off for a month. Some lunatic bombed both termini simultaneously.’

  ‘Yes. My parents were on the embassy staff at New Stavanger. By the time the Line was replaced my mother was in labour.’

  And the kung believed that when a child was born its receptive mind was taken over by the nearest available discarnate soul …

  ‘As a matter of fact my father was prevented from killing himself by the Shad cultural attaché, who was dining with him,’ said Marco levelly. ‘He thought he could get to me first, you see? It didn’t work. So they put out humanity papers on me and found me a home with an old couple down in Mexico, and then they left Earth. End of story. How come you’re bald?’

  Kin’s hand flew to her wig.

  ‘Uh. Age. Hair can’t take it.’

  Marco was watching the horizon intently. ‘Oh,’ he said. ‘I wondered. I always think one shouldn’t be shy about this sort of thing, don’t you?’

  The boat chattered through half-drowned groves and flotillas of villages until it was brought to a dead halt by weeds brushing against the hull. Marco swore, and kicked the power changeover.

  ‘It’s the tide,’ said Marco. Hull out of water, they whirred on through streaming vegetation. A few late fish, abandoned by the water, were hopping awkwardly after the departing sea. On Kung only amphibians survived for long.

  Presently the vegetation and the gradient suggested country that was seldom inundated for more than one hour in twenty. Under the boatkung’s direction they picked up a track that wound up into permanently dry grassland. If Kung had been a human world it would have been cultivated to within an inch of its life. The kung shunned it as a desert.

  The boat jolted over a ridge.

  There was a round valley, with the inevitable lake at the bottom, and a spaceship bobbing at its centre.

  ‘It’s a General Motors Neutrino, ground-to-ground ring-rim fusion motor, Spindle unibrake, thirty-four staterooms, choice of extras,’ said Marco, lighting his pipe. ‘The insystem systems are a bugger. I flew one once. They were built to meet a demand which wasn’t.’

  It looked like a fat doughnut.

  ‘Has it got any armaments?’ asked Kin weakly.

  ‘Jalo!’ screamed the raven.

  ‘Wouldn’t like to be on the wrong side of the fusion flame.’

  The boatkung was looking at Marco’s pipe in terror. ‘Apart from that – there’s a roomy hold. Name your own horrors.’

  As they stepped into the ship’s open hatch the boatkung gunned his craft and headed back across the lake.

  ‘Looks like the only way off is up,’ said Kin. ‘I wonder what frightened him?’

  ‘Me,’ said Marco, and walked aboard soundlessly – then hissed and crouched into a fighting stance.

  A shape lurched towards them. Racial memories told Kin to run and climb a tree. The thing bearing down on them could only be intent on clawing gashes in soft membranes, and gouging with those fangs. Racial memories were behind the times, as usual. Kin grinned politely.

  The shand could just about stand in the high corridor without its tiny ears touching the ceiling, which meant it was almost three metres high. It was, though, holding the knee-sagging, self-effacing posture that shandi always adopted inside the artefacts of smaller races, as if in terror lest they accidentally eat someone.

  Typically, it – she – was as broad as she was high, with wide arms ending in calloused knuckles that could double as another pair of feet. There was an intelligent bear’s face, but it was a bear with binocular vision and a domed skull and several walruses in its ancestry. It had two tusks said to have been used originally for scraping molluscs from the beds of freezing oceans, now as useless as the vermiform appendix, and carved into status-denoting shapes. Its snout—

  ‘If you have klite fliniffed?’ she lisped reproachfully.

  There was something altogether familiar about some of those tusk carvings. Kin stuck her fingers in the corners of her mouth for tuscal effects and tried her Shandi.

  ‘I am Relative/Almost-Parched-And-Dry and the kung is – Small-stain-go-far,’ she spat. ‘I greet you in all grease, O shand of the Lower Conwexi Delta Moraine Region, unless I am very much mistaken.’

  ‘I congratulate you on your mastery of the Speech,’ said the shand graciously. ‘My name is fifty-six syllables long, but you may call me Silver. Are you coming to the flat world? Is the kung dangerous? He looks uneasy.’

  ‘I think it’s because he can’t understand Shandi. On the other hand, all kung look uneasy. It’s probably something to do with the flash tides. This one’s human, by the way, don’t press the point.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’ Marco asked suspiciously.

  By the time Silver had led them into the ship’s observation cabin they had reached a compromise. Kin and Marco spoke to Silver in allspeak, which the shand understood but, because of her tusks, could not speak, Silver spoke in shandi, which she could pronounce and Marco could not understand, and Kin translated into allspeak for Marco. Eventually it was established by careful retranslation that Silver was a sociologist, comparative historian, linguist and meat-animal herder.

  ‘All of them?’ asked Marco.

  ‘I once knew a shand who was a lift-attendant, biochemist and seal hunter,’ said Kin.

  ‘I got here yesterday,’ said Silver. ‘I was working on Prediquac when this man—’

  ‘We know him,’ said Kin. ‘What did he offer you?’

  ‘I do not understand,’ said Silver blankly.

  ‘Bait,’ said Kin. ‘To go with him to the flat world.’

  ‘Oh, I see. Nothing. Should he have done?’

  Kin translated. Marco stared at the shand in astonishment, then snorted and wandered off into the depths of the ship.

  ‘There is something familiar about your name,’ said Silver to Kin.

  ‘I wrote a book called Continuous Creation.’

  Silver smiled politely. ‘Did you?’

  Marco had disappeared. The two females took a stroll through the doughnut hull. With every step Kin became more uneasy. This was a strange ship.

  It had been converted to a freighter. There were four staterooms. The rest of the torus was fuel tank.

  The ship had been designed to be a rich idiot’s toy. Only rich men and spies used ships that could stagger out of a gravity well under their own power.

  Consider: there was a Line on every useful world, and once up the Line all that was needed was a pressurized box with altitude jets and an Elsewhere matrix to get you to the top of any other Line. A few specialized trades and the tourist industry used ships capable of traversing a solar system. There were even some ships that could fly ground-to-orbit in an emergency. No one needed a ship that could reach orbit and fly across a system and jump via the Elsewhere.

  This one could. Kin’s unease began to be tinted with excitement. The Line and the Matrix had chopped space into mere pauses between identical Line Top arrival lounges. This ship was something else.

  There was a dumbwaiter, a big model programmed to produce anything from lobster thermidor to sawdust. It could even reproduce shand proteins.

  There was a medical room that would not have disgraced a city. There was also a deep freeze, a fact so unusual that Kin lifted the lid.

  ‘Now here’s a thing,’ she murmured. Silver peered in, and rooted around among the frosted packages.

  ‘Nothing remarkable,’ sh
e said. ‘Meat, fish, fowl, leaves, swollen tubers – human food.’

  Kin pointed at the dumbwaiter, humming seductively to itself.

  ‘Ever known one of those to fail?’ she said.

  ‘They don’t,’ said Silver. ‘If they did, you humans would never have allowed us into space.’

  ‘Then why waste space and weight hauling this junk? If he was nervous, he’d bring shandi food – uh. Of course. I forget he’s old.’

  ‘Old?’

  ‘Old enough to be fussy about machine-made food. This lot here must have cost him a fortune.’

  ‘Please explain about “old”,’ said Silver insistently.

  Kin told the shand about the Terminus probe. When she finished she was aware that the giant was looking at her oddly.

  ‘You humans must have been mad for space,’ she said.

  They turned as Marco strode silently into the room, trembling with rage.

  ‘What is this ship?’ he bawled. ‘There’s enough weaponry in the hold to blow a hole through a planet.’

  ‘And small-arms,’ murmured Kin. Marco stared at her, while she felt her mind beginning to think very fast indeed.

  ‘Precisely. But how did you guess?’

  ‘No guess, I think I’ve seen enough. Silver, was there a message from Jalo when you got here?’

  ‘The kung in the ferry said I was to wait. Why?’

  Kin shook her head urgently. ‘Marco, there must be spacesuits around. If we got into them, could you evacuate the ship?’

  ‘Down here? It’d implode. I’d have to take her up, and that—’

  ‘This is a .0003 Clipe automatic. If you all leapt at me the chances are I would not get you all, but who could I shoot first?’

  Jalo was standing by the door, the pistol dangling nonchalantly from one hand. Kin thought about what a stream of Clipe needles could do, and decided to stand very still. She glanced at Silver.

  The shand wasn’t looking at Jalo. She was staring at Marco.

  He had dropped into a curious bowlegged stance, arms held out from his body like an ancient gunfighter, and he was hissing softly.

  ‘Tell it if it attacks, I will shoot,’ said Jalo. ‘Tell it!’

  ‘You know he can understand you,’ said Kin coldly. She heard Silver say in shandi: ‘In a minute there’s going to be an almighty fight, Kin. No one threatens a kung and lives.’

  ‘Marco is legally human,’ said Kin in allspeak.

  ‘Yes, that fooled me,’ said Jalo. ‘I should have known better. I told that agency computer on Real Earth to pick three people that fitted my specifications, and it gave me three names. The damn thing never bothered to say two of them were BEMs.’

  Only Silver, student of history, understood the term. She growled.

  ‘It surely mentioned planets of origin,’ said Kin.

  ‘The big frog was born on Earth, though, and the bear born in a ship orbiting Shand,’ said Jalo. ‘Doesn’t anyone ever mention species these days? Legally human! Ye gods! Do not move.’

  ‘I was wondering where you were,’ said Kin. ‘I should have been looking for a patch of fuzzy air – looter.’

  He grinned lopsidedly. ‘The word is, uh, nasty but true. Just like the Company looted strata machines and the Line monomolecular technique.’

  ‘Not true. The Company administers them for the general good.’

  ‘Fine, so on this trip the profits will be for my general good. I figure I’m owed something. I knew LeVine and the rest. I trained with them. I’m taking my reward now. I’ve got the jackpot.’

  Something small and black hopped around the curve of the corridor behind him. Kin recalled that Marco, determinedly human, had been trying to make a pet of the raven. It was feeding time.

  ‘I shall need assistance,’ Jalo said.

  ‘You’ve got the self-filling purse,’ said Kin. ‘That sounds like a jackpot to me.’

  ‘Nah. With what’s here we can start our own Company where we’re going.’ He reached into a sidepocket and pulled out a navigation reel. ‘It’s all here.’

  ‘I would prefer to talk further without the piftol threatening uf,’ said Silver painfully. ‘It if not kind.’

  The raven flew up onto Jalo’s shoulder and screamed in his ear—

  —a stream of Clipe needles zonked into the ceiling—

  —Marco moved so fast that his passage across the space separating him from Jalo could only be deduced from the fact that he was suddenly astride the fallen figure, the Clipe held in one hand and the other three raised to smash a skull—

  —he blinked, and looked around as if waking from a dream.

  He stared at Jalo, and then leaned forward.

  ‘He’s dead,’ he said helplessly. ‘I didn’t even strike him.’

  Kin knelt down by the man.

  ‘He was dead before you got there.’

  She had seen the face go snow-white after the bird’s scream. Jalo had already been dropping when Marco reached him.

  He was sufficiently recently dead for it to be worth slotting his body into the ship’s medical sargo, which immediately flashed a row of red lights. Kin checked the readings on the panel below. Cell rupture, organ rupture, brain damage – when they got back to a human world it would be six months in a resurrection vat for Jalo.

  ‘A coronary?’ suggested Silver.

  ‘Massive,’ said Kin. ‘He’s lucky.’

  There was silence, and when Kin turned the shand was looking at her in astonishment.

  ‘Coronary is easy,’ she explained. ‘We can repair that. Simple job. If Marco had got to work on him there wouldn’t have been anything left to put in a vat. He threatened Marco.’

  Silver nodded. ‘Kung are paranoid. But he also acts like a human.’

  ‘You watch him enter a room. That walk of his is a fighting stance. Kung don’t know the meaning of the word fear.’

  ‘Fine,’ said Silver pleasantly. ‘Half kung, half human. Well, I know the meaning of the word fear, and right now I’m scared.’

  ‘Yeah, I can see—’

  (a few seconds of vertigo, an eternity of despair)

  The first thing Kin registered when her sight came back was the cabin window and the view outside. The ship appeared to be surrounded by a fog full of icebergs.

  She was dimly aware of an alarm, which cut off abruptly.

  She was aware of hazy stars, and of drifting across the cabin because there was no gravity. Silver was floating near what had been the ceiling, out cold.

  Let’s see. The ship had been floating on a lake. Now it was floating in space. Outside was frozen air and quite a bit of the lake, so down on Kung storms must be raging since a few cubic hectares of air and water had suddenly been dragged into space inside the ship’s Elsewhere field …

  In free fall Kin’s natural genius felt somewhat cramped. She swam and bounced her way to the control room, where Marco was hunched over the main consol like a spider, and screamed in his ear.

  He grabbed her out of the air and turned her to face the big screen at the far side of the cabin.

  She stared, open mouthed.

  After a while she fetched Silver, who was treating a slight headwound in the medical room and cursing in several languages, and made her watch.

  When the film was finished they ran it through again.

  ‘I put Jalo’s reel in the navigator,’ said Marco finally. ‘It included this.’

  ‘Run it again,’ said Kin. ‘I want to have another look at one or two bits.’

  ‘The picture quality is exceptionally good,’ said Marco.

  ‘It had to be. They were meant to be transmitted over tens of parsecs—’

  ‘If I may interrupt for a few seconds,’ said Silver. She reached up to her tusks, and began to twist them. Kin watched in fascinated horror as the fangs unscrewed and were stowed away in a small leather case. She had seen fangless shandi on Shand itself, but they were children or condemned criminals.

  ‘In order to be a good linguist on
e must be prepared to make sacrifices,’ said Silver in faultless allspeak. ‘Do you think I submitted to the operation without much secret shame and soul-searching? However, I have something to say. Do I strike you, Marco Farfarer, as a character of ill-humour and short temper?’

  ‘No. Why?’

  ‘If you try a stunt like you just did once more, I will kill you.’

  ‘I thought it was impossible anyway,’ said Kin, with hasty diplomacy.

  Marco looked from one to the other.

  ‘It’s not impossible, simply tricky and highly illegal,’ he said carefully. ‘Do it wrong, and you end up in the middle of the nearest sun. As for your, uh, statement, Silver – I have noted it.’

  They both nodded gravely.

  ‘Right,’ said Kin brightly. ‘Fine. Now show the film again.’

  Either the film was genuine or Jalo was an unsung special-effects genius.

  It might have been the polar regions of New Earth, or anywhere on Serendipity. Not Njal and Milkgaard, because those worlds had no birds and one picture showed a flock of birds in the distance – until Silver turned up the magnification. Whatever they were, they were not birds. Not with those horse heads, black scales and bat-black wings. But there was a word for them in human history, and the name Dragon unfolded in Kin’s mind.

  There was a seascape, and unless there was something very wrong with the size of the waves, the snake-headed beast looping through them was fully a kilometre long.

  There were distant views of what might have been cities. There were several sunsets, at least one taken from the air, and a number of night shots of starscapes.

  ‘Go back to the aerial sunset,’ said Kin. ‘Now what’s wrong?’

  ‘Horizon’s odd,’ said Marco.

  It was. The curve was oddly flattened. There was something else wrong too, something Kin couldn’t immediately spot.

  ‘Apart from that, it could be any human world,’ observed Silver.

  ‘Funny,’ said Kin. ‘Jalo talked about a flat Earth, not just a flat world.’

  ‘That does not surprise me. Humans have been the only race to entertain the primitive idea of a flat world,’ said Marco, running the film back to the starscapes. ‘If you don’t believe me, look it up. Kung always thought they lived on the inside of a sphere, and shandi always had big Twin hanging up there to teach them a basic lesson in cosmology.’